THE WAR POETS

RUPERT BROOKS

SIGFRIED SASSOON

WILFRED OWEN

JOHN MCRAE

The First World War had a far-reaching effect on English poetry. It provided a new
source of inspiration for the poets of established reputation and brought to public
notice many poets, particularly among the young men who fought in the war.
Moreover, it serves as a great social document. There can be no clearer reflection of
the changing national attitude to the war than that found in war poetry. Broadly two
phases of the national attitude can be distinguished in war poetry. The first was one
of patriotic fervour, almost of rejoicing in the opportunity of self-sacrifice in the
cause of human freedom, and a revival of the romantic conception of the knight-at-
arms. Many poets who lived and served throughout the war had this patriotic fervour
of the early years unaffected. But as the carnage went on increasing and there was no
hope of its end, other poets arose with the declared intention of blasting this romantic
illusion of the glory of war by a frank realistic depiction of the horrors, savagery and
futility of war. This realistic attitude to the war was at first cried down as unpatriotic,
but it has stood the test of time better than the romantic attitude of the early years.
The poets of the 1914-18 war divide themselves into two groups- romantic war poets
and realistic war poets.

Hundreds of volumes of war poetry were published; poets – including Rupert

Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves,
Isaac Rosenberg and many others – recorded what they saw and felt during the war,
from their initial longings for glory to the final terrible confrontation with death.

The first world war was welcome with enthusiasm.

A lot of young men volunteered for military service in the early months of war, and
they were the first to apprehend the horror and suffering of war. There are two kinds
of war poets the first make an exaltation of the war as we can see in Rupert Brooke
the second felt the no sense of war as we can see in Wilfred Owen.

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RUPERT BROOKE

The most outstanding of the romantic (idealistic) war poets was Rupert
Brooke (1887-1915).

Rupert Chawner Brooke (3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915) was an English poet
known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially
"The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have
prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man
in England"Much of Brooke’s reputation is due to his remarkably good looks, his
winning personality and his premature death in action stifling great expectations. He
began to write poetry in the Georgian tradition, drawing inspirations from nature and
simple pleasures. Out of this Georgian mood he was swept by the high emotions
inspired by the rising wave of patriotism on the eve of the world war. He hailed the
war with patriotic fervour. He wrote a number of war sonnets to express his patriotic
enthusiasm, his pride in England, and his resolve to serve her. He became the
spokesman for the dedication of the English people to the cause of their country. Of
his war sonnets the most typical is The Soldier. The poem is nostalgic, sentimental
and patriotic, he is not afraid of death, the grove will be in England, he will enrich the
foreign soil with his dust of English origin, he will be buried in England earth. There
is an emphasis on war, he exalts English race. Death suggests glory, immortality and
peace. In this poem the principal theme is the exaltation of the homeland, together
with his pride in being an Englishman and his glorification of the death of English
soldiers in the front for England. He enlisted as a soldier and went to war to defend
the honour of his motherland. As a war-poet he takes an idealistic view of war and
speaks of its glory, glamour and heroism, and not its brutality and ghastliness.

Brooke enlisted at the outbreak of war in August 1914. He came to public attention as
a war poet early the following year, when The Times Literary Supplement published
two sonnets ("IV: The Dead" and "V: The Soldier") on 11 March; the latter was then
read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday (4 April).

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Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February
1915 but developed a severe gastroenteritis whilst stationed in Egypt followed by
streptococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. French surgeons carried out two
operations to drain the abscess but he died of septicaemia at 4:46 pm on 23 April
1915, on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, moored in a bay off the Greek
island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the landings at Gallipoli.
As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried at
11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros. The site was chosen by his close friend, William
Denis Browne, who wrote of Brooke's death:
I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun
shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and the
shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that
lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.
He assumed a symbolic role that turned into the myth of a young and beautiful fallen.
He didn't get in touch with the horrors of the war because he wasn't a simple soldier.
Brooke died in 1915 at the age of 28.

On 11 November 1985, Brooke was among 16 First World War poets commemorated
on a slate monument unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The
inscription on the stone was written by a fellow war poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads:
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

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 The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Brooke himself, predominantly a prewar poet, died the year before "The Soldier" was
published. It deals with the death and accomplishments of a soldier.
“The Soldier” explores the bond between a patriotic British soldier and his
homeland. Through this soldier's passionate discussion of his relationship to
England, the poem implies that people are formed by their home environment and
culture, and that their country is something worth defending with their life.
This sonnet encompasses the memoirs of a deceased soldier who declares his
patriotism to his homeland by declaring that his sacrifice will be the eternal
ownership of England of the small portion of land where his body is buried.
The atmosphere remains constantly in the blissful state of the English soldier.

SIEGFRIED SASSOON

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) Born in an upper-class family, he is the first soldier

poet to treat the war with horrifying realism and bitter satire and irony. Invalided
early in the war, he writes from his personal experiences in the front. Unlike Rupert
Brooke he does not throw any romantic veil over the realities of war, which he
depicts “as a dirty mess of blood and decaying bodies.” First poet that portrayed the
truth about war. He carried out his protest against “the political errors and
insincerities for which the soldiers are being sacrificed. He is extremely spontaneous
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as his descriptions are cruel and realistic. He uses devices like satire, documentary. A
pacifist at heart he writes about the nightmare of trench warfare and other horrors. In
his Counter-attack (1918), a collection of violent, embittered poems, he paints, with
a studied bluntness, and often a provocative coarseness of language, the horrors of
life and death in the trenches, dug-outs and hospitals. A merciless and calculated
realism gives to his work a vitality not previously found in English poetry. His poetry
bears the stamp of his determination to shock the people at home into the bitter
realization of the ghastly truth.

Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of
the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and
satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible
for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed
forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his
"Soldier's Declaration" of July 1917, culminating in his admission to Craiglockhart
War Hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was
greatly influenced by him.

In 1915 he joined the British Army, as did his brother Hamo, who was killed during
the Gallipoli Campaign in the same year. Sassoon fought in France and during the
hard years of conflict, his poetry became more and more critical against war. In 1917
he was seriously wounded by a bullet. While he was recovering, he wrote this letter
to his Commanding Officer accusing the government of prolonging the war
unnecessarily. By writing the letter, he risked being condemned to prison (or to
death) by court martial, but the trial never took place due to his physical condition. In
the letter, the poet expresses his sense of responsibility towards all soldiers,
describing their suffering and denouncing the folly and uselessness of war. “

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance1 of military authority,

because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the
power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I
believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has
now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I
and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to
have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects
which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiations. I have seen and endured
the suffering of the troops, and I can go no longer be a party to prolong these
sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against
the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the
fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make
this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that
I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at

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home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they
have not sufficient imagination to realize”.

On 11 November 1985, Sassoon was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated
on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on
the stone was written by friend and fellow War poet Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My
subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity”.

WILFRED OWEN

(1893–1918) is the greatest of the war poets. He was killed in action on 4

November 1918, a week before the war's end, at the age of 25.

He discards the usual romantic notions about war and strikes a new realistic note in
his war poetry. Unlike Rupert Brooke he does not find in soldiers’ exploits “a sense
of new crusades and modern knightliness.” He expresses in his poems the dreadful
experience he underwent as a soldier, Inspired by Sassoon’s war poetry he presents
the cruelty and inhumanity of a soldier’s doing, the reality and futility of war and the
reckless wastage of nobility, youth and heroism. He looks upon war as a meaningless
dance of death and an agency of great suffering to mankind. He regards it as the cruel
business of the arm-chair politicians who exploit the blooming youth in the name of
patriotism.

But what distinguishes Owen’s war poetry is not the description of the horrors of war,
but the exploration of the pity of war.

Owen discovered his poetic vocation in about 1904 during a holiday spent
in Cheshire. He was raised as an Anglican of the evangelical type, and in his youth
was a devout believer, in part thanks to his strong relationship with his mother, which
lasted throughout his life. His early influences included the Bible and the Romantic
poets, particularly Wordsworth and John Keats.

From 1913 he worked as a private tutor teaching English and French at the Berlitz
School of Languages in Bordeaux, France, and later with a family.

When war broke out, Owen did not rush to enlist – and even considered joining the
French army – but eventually returned to England

On 21 October 1915, he enlisted in the Artists Rifles. For the next seven months, he
trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex On 4 June 1916, he was commissioned as
a second lieutenant.

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 However, his imaginative existence was to be changed dramatically by a number of
traumatic experiences. He fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion; he was
caught in the blast of a trench mortar shell and spent several days unconscious on an
embankment lying amongst the remains of one of his fellow officers. Soon afterward,
Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia or shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War
Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. It was while recuperating at Craiglockhart that
he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, an encounter that was to transform Owen's life.
In a war hospital he produced his most brillant poems. He used many assonance and
alliteration this give moral force which people must suffer and die. His sonnet
DULCE ET DECORUM EST based on the poet's experience of horrors of war. I.

Owen returned in July 1918, to active service in France, although he might have
stayed on home-duty indefinitely. His decision to return was probably the result of
Sassoon's being sent back to England, after being shot in the head in an apparent
"friendly fire" incident, and put on sick-leave for the remaining duration of the war.
Owen saw it as his duty to add his voice to that of Sassoon, that the horrific realities
of the war might continue to be told. Sassoon was violently opposed to the idea of
Owen returning to the trenches, threatening to "stab [him] in the leg" if he tried it.
Aware of his attitude, Owen did not inform him of his action until he was once again
in France.
At the very end of August 1918, Owen returned to the front line – perhaps imitating
Sassoon's example. On 1 October 1918, Owen led units of the Second Manchesters to
storm a number of enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt. For his courage
and leadership in the Joncourt action, he was awarded the Military Cross, an award
he had always sought in order to justify himself as a war poet, but the award was
not gazetted until 15 February 1919. The citation followed on 30 July 1919:
“October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he
assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack.
He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position
and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most
gallantly”.
Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of
the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of
the Armistice which ended the war, and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the
day after his death. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death
on Armistice Day, as the church bells in Shrewsbury were ringing out in
celebration. Owen is buried in northern France. The inscription on his gravestone,
chosen by his mother Susan, is a quotation from his poetry: "SHALL LIFE RENEW
THESE BODIES? OF A TRUTH ALL DEATH WILL HE ANNUL" W.O
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Owen held Siegfried Sassoon in an esteem not far from hero-worship, remarking to
his mother that he was "not worthy to light [Sassoon's] pipe". The relationship clearly
had a profound impact on Owen, who wrote in his first letter to Sassoon after leaving
Craiglockhart "You have fixed my life – however short". Sassoon wrote that he took
"an instinctive liking to him", and recalled their time together "with affection".
Sassoon and Owen kept in touch through correspondence, and after Sassoon was shot
in the head in July 1918 and sent back to the UK to recover, they met in August and
spent what Sassoon described as "the whole of a hot cloudless afternoon
together." They never saw each other again. About three weeks later, Owen wrote to
bid Sassoon farewell, as he was on the way back to France, and they continued to
communicate. After the Armistice, Sassoon waited in vain for word from Owen, only
to be told of his death several months later. The loss grieved Sassoon greatly, and he
was never "able to accept that disappearance philosophically."

FUTILITY details an event where a group of soldiers attempts to revive an

unconscious soldier by moving him into the warm sunlight on a snowy meadow.
However, the "kind old sun" cannot help the soldier - he has died.
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Death

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Owen's grave, in Ors communal cemetery
been more powerfully shown than in

“Above all, I am not concerned with poetry.

My subject is war and the pity of war,

The poetry is in the pity.”

There is in each of his poems a piercing pity welling out of the colossal waste of
human life and opportunity, the callous indifference with which human lives are
thrown away in the front a pity more sober and restrained, yet deeper far than the
sentimental pity aroused by the tragic tangles of domestic life.

JOHN MCCRAE
(November 30, 1872 – January 28, 1918) was a Canadian poet, physician, author,
artist and soldier during World War I, and a surgeon during the Second Battle of
Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In
Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war.
When Britain declared war on Germany because of the latter's invasion of neutral
Belgium at the beginning of World War I (1914), Canada, as a Dominion within the
British Empire, was at war as well. McCrae volunteered for service at age 41. He
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wrote a friend, "I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay at home with my
conscience."] He was appointed as Medical Officer and Major of the 1st Brigade CFA
(Canadian Field Artillery). He treated the wounded during the Second Battle of
Ypres in 1915,
McCrae's friend and former militia member, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed in the
battle, and his burial inspired the poem, "In Flanders Fields", which was written on
May 3, 1915.
From June 1, 1915, McCrae was ordered away from the artillery to set up No. 3
Canadian General Hospital at Dannes-Camiers near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern
France. For eight months the hospital operated in Durbar tents (donated by
the Begum of Bhopal and shipped from India), but after suffering from storms,
floods, and frosts it was moved in February 1916 into the old Jesuit College
in Boulogne-sur-Mer. C.L.C. Allinson reported that McCrae "most unmilitarily told
[me] what he thought of being transferred to the medicals and being pulled away
from his beloved guns. His last words to me were: 'Allinson, all the goddamn doctors
in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting
men.'"
"In Flanders Fields" first appeared anonymously in Punch on December 8, 1915, but
in the index to that year, McCrae was named as the author (misspelt as McCree). The
verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless
fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated (a Latin version begins In agro
belgico...).
"In Flanders Fields" was also extensively printed in the United States, whose
government was contemplating joining the war.
On January 28, 1918, while still commanding No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at
Boulogne, McCrae died of pneumonia with "extensive pneumococcus meningitis" at
the British General Hospital in Wimereux, France. He was buried the following day
in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission section of Wimereux Cemetery, just
a couple of kilometres up the coast from Boulogne, with full military honours.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
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 We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
As with his earlier poems, "In Flanders Fields" continues McCrae's preoccupation
with death and how it stands as the transition between the struggle of life and the
peace that follows. It is written from the point of view of the dead. It speaks of their
sacrifice and serves as their command to the living to press on. As with many of the
most popular works of the First World War, it was written early in the conflict, before
the romanticism of war turned to bitterness and disillusion for soldiers and civilians
alike.
Though various legends have developed as to the inspiration for the poem, the most
commonly held belief is that McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields" on May 3, 1915, the
day after presiding over the funeral and burial of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer,
who had been killed during the Second Battle of Ypres. The poem was written as he
sat upon the back of a medical field ambulance near an advance dressing post at
Essex Farm, just north of Ypres. The poppy, which was a central feature of the poem,
grew in great numbers in the spoiled earth of the battlefields and cemeteries of
Flanders. An article by Veteran's Administration Canada provides this account:
The day before he wrote his famous poem, one of McCrae's closest friends was killed
in the fighting and buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross. Wild
poppies were already beginning to bloom between the crosses marking the many
graves.

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